


Crescent City

by rosewindow



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-21
Updated: 2013-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-05 09:10:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1092143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosewindow/pseuds/rosewindow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lydia had two schedules for her conference. The first was for the gifted high school mathematicians conference in clean, brightly lit hotel lecture halls. The second was for a series of tiny store fronts and back rooms all across the city.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crescent City

**Author's Note:**

  * For [waltzmatildah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/waltzmatildah/gifts).



> This was written for waltzmatildah for the FandomAid Typhoon Haiyan Buy it Now Fundraiser.

Lydia had two schedules for her conference. The first was for the gifted high school mathematicians conference in clean, brightly lit hotel lecture halls. The second was for a series of tiny store fronts and back rooms all across the city.

She left her hotel and crossed the street that divided the relatively modern business district from the carriage-filled French Quarter; her heels clacked on the rails of the street car. The first stop was Jackson Square.

“Well, this is tacky.”

The heavily accessorized woman in the flower print muumuu sitting under a bedazzled umbrella looked up and laughed. “Half of the job is selling it, sweetheart. You must be Lydia. Sit.”

Lydia sat.

“Another bean sídhe, eh? This city’s seen a few of you. One of ‘em’s even alive still.” The woman grinned.

“Yes. I’m meeting with her tomorrow.”

The woman nodded and began to shuffle a deck of Tarot cards. Lydia rolled her eyes, not unsubtly. “I am on a bit of a schedule.”

“Choose.”

Lydia plucked a card out of the deck and placed it face up on the little table.

“Death Reversed. An unpleasant change and a refusal to face it.”

“I could have told you that,” Lydia scoffed, glancing at her watch.

“Choose again.”

Lydia did.

“The High Priestess Upright. Secret wisdom and knowledge yet to be revealed.”

Despite herself, Lydia found that encouraging.

“One more.”

Lydia placed the last card on the table, and was only mildly surprised. The so-called mystic was apparently more surprised by the reappearance of Death, this time Upright.

“New Life. Transformation. Change,” Lydia said. “Will you tell me where to find my contact, now?”

The shaken woman gave her directions to a little junk shop on the edge of the French Quarter. Lydia thanked her, left a few dollars, and strode off. She thought she might like the Quarter, if it weren’t so full of tourists, discordant noises, and garbage. The cathedral was lovely though - smooth lines and white walls, stark against the blue sky. The wind off the river was blowing clouds in, and the sky darkened as she walked along Chartres Street past art galleries and overhanging balconies. The streets got seedier the farther she got from the main tourist district, and the shop she was headed for was flanked by a battered coffee shop and an abandoned building with two street kids and their dog squatting by the entrance.

A bell tinkled half-heartedly as she entered, but the bored-looking girl leaning against the counter didn’t look up until she passed. They exchanged a look of mutual disdain as Lydia walked directly to the back of the store. On a dilapidated couch tucked behind a reclaimed wood dresser with a stuffed alligator on top was a woman who looked like she hadn’t bathed in months.

“Ms Lorraine?” Lydia asked prodding her with a nearby umbrella.

The woman pried one eye open. “Stiles?” she croaked.

Lydia wrinkled her nose. “Decidedly not. Look, I have things I need to do before my lecture at two. You’re cutting into my shopping time.”

Ms Lorraine - both Stiles and the medium in front of St. Louis Cathedral had referred to her as Legless Lorraine - stood up, revealing two perfectly intact legs. Lydia was going to kill Stiles. She stepped into Lydia’s space and Lydia managed to stop herself after one step back.

“You’re here about the history book. Stiles said he needed it. ‘Life or death’ were his exact words.”

“Stiles is - to put it the nicest possible way - a drama queen. He thinks insufficient cheese on nachos is life or death.”

Lorraine cackled, laugh lines creasing her dark skin. “Here.”

Out of a stack of second-hand books she pulled an equally battered hardback and handed it to Lydia. She kept hold of the book for a moment longer.

“You’ll be even more dangerous, Miss Martin, when you figure out what you are.”

Her words echoed in Lydia’s head the entire walk back through the Quarter and across Canal to her hotel. She put it out of her mind as she headed into her lecture, but when Stiles called to bother her later, she gave him an earful.

“Stiles, your contact is the worst.”

“Her name is Legless Lorraine. Were you really expecting reliability?”

“How is this my life?” Lydia sighed, sipping her café au lait and watching tourists take pictures of themselves with the sunset over Jackson Square as the backdrop.

Stiles deliberately misheard her. “Yeah. It’s great, isn’t it?”

\---

Lydia went out with a tour group to the Garden District the next morning, but she quickly ducked them and made her way to her next meeting.

There was only one other banshee in the continental United States that Lydia could find. She was a music professor at Tulane University and her dog loved Lydia. They were sitting on the narrow porch of her brightly colored shotgun, and the dog was curled up on top of Lydia’s feet. She stirred a bit more sugar into her lemonade and listened as Lydia told her story.

“The bite probably triggered it; your powers manifested a bit young.”

“So I’ve gathered. I just need to get a hold on them before I go off to college.”

Bevin sighed. “It’s not exactly about ‘getting a hold on them,’ I’m afraid. Your powers either become you or they consume you.”

This wasn’t what Lydia wanted to hear. She’d been expecting trainings, maybe some breathing exercises, like what Allison and her father did, or what Scott, Stiles, and Isaac practiced in the woods every weekend.

“You say you belong to a Pack?”

Lydia nodded.

“Ask them. Every one of them will have a different way of being a Wolf. So it is with us. There are no definite answers.”

Lydia wasn’t a fan of not knowing. The time she’d spent in thrall to Peter Hale and then during the Darach attacks when she didn’t know what was happening with her were two of the worst periods of her life. And not just because of the high body count. But now, identity had given her purpose, or it was supposed to.

“I’ll be honest, I was expecting more real world life lessons and less mystical advice.”

Bevin laughed. “Me too, baby. Me too. Look, here’s some advice. Go out with your friends - to Frenchman, not Bourbon. Hit on cute boys, hit on cute girls, make out with the cutest one. Try not to mix alcohols, but if you do, know who will hold your hair for you. Respect the order of things, but tell the world when it’s wrong. Don’t silence yourself for anyone but you. There’s some advice for you.”

\---

Lydia left the meeting feeling comforted, but not entirely sure why. She rode the streetcar back into town, quietly judging the obvious tourists. She spent the day shopping in the Quarter; picking up trinkets for Scott and Stiles, an interesting print for Danny, and beignet mix for Allison’s secret sweet tooth. She considered an intricately carved dagger for a long while before deciding that she wouldn’t be able to sneak it through security.

It was their last night, so Lydia and her roommates for the conference all went out. They ate jambalaya and didn’t get carded when they ordered Pimm’s Cups. The Quarter was magical at night - and they followed Bevin’s advice and avoided Bourbon Street. After an evening of jazz and distractions, Lydia finally allowed herself a moment of introspection.

She could turn it off, she knew, around normal people who wouldn’t recognize the supernatural until it bit them. But, she realized a moment later, she didn’t want to. Colleges and scholarships and potential thesis projects were still interesting, and she was still planning on winning that Fields Medal, but there was so much more in her life now. A whole history she didn’t yet know, a fledgling Pack, an Alpha who relied on her, and Allison.

They passed behind St. Louis Cathedral with the giant, shadowy Jesus across the back wall, and the sound of a lone saxaphone down Pirate’s Alley. A group of college-aged boys, fresh from Bourbon Street with brightly colored Hurricanes in their hands, was imitating the touchdown pose of the statue and shouting and whooping.

Her friends giggled and rolled their eyes as they walked past, and Lydia smirked at their pitiful attempts at screams. She paused. She was a banshee, a bean sídhe, a creature of legend, she could show them. She tossed her head back and bayed at the night sky. Laughing at the boys’ stunned expressions and feeling whole for the first time in ages, Lydia strolled onwards.

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies to anyone who actually knows/does Tarot. I’m going off internet descriptions and picking what sounded cool.  
> I have taken a few minor liberties with places in the French Quarter, but for the most part every place in this story can be visited.


End file.
